Dr. Ahn’s general research interests and experiences include the ecological functions of created wetlands, wetland system ecology, water quality, wetland creation and restoration, nutrient dynamics and ecological modeling. He also has recently begun to apply the techniques of environmental molecular biology in his research to study the linkages between sediment microbial community patterns and nutrient processes in wetlands.

His lab Wetland Ecosystem Laboratory has several main topics of study: wetland creation/restoration techniques, ecological monitoring of mitigation wetlands and microbial community patterns along biogeochemical gradients in constructed wetlands.

Through his postdoctoral work at the Illinois Water Resources Center of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ahn focused on developing a dynamic model to predict vegetation responses to many different scenarios of river hydrology being manipulated for the restoration of Illinois floodplain-river ecosystem. Through this project, Ahn worked with a number of stakeholders, including The Nature Conservancy and National Science Foundation.

Cara Frankenfeld is an assistant professor of epidemiology in the Department of Global and Community Health.Her work seeks to understand the way that diet, environment, and our host bacteria interact to affect human health.She is also working on how we measure diet and in the relationship between dietary flavonoids and isoflavonoids (particular compounds in fruits, vegetables, and soy and other legumes) and chronic conditions.

She is a member of the American College of Epidemiology, the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology, the American Association for Cancer Research, and the American Society for Nutrition.

Frankenfeld completed a M.S. in Nutritional Sciences at the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. in Epidemiology at the University of Washington, where she studied the relationship between markers of intestinal bacteria profile and postmenopausal breast cancer risk factors.In addition to this main area of study, she also worked on projects evaluating the validity of food frequency questionnaires, footwear and fall risk in the elderly, and risk factors for meningioma.She completed post-doctoral work at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the National Cancer Institute.She has also provided consulting expertise in the areas of environmental and occupational epidemiology, including dioxins, asbestos, and electric and magnetic fields.

Mark Uhen is a geologist and an expert in the evolution of cetaceans and other marine mammals. He looks at changes in the diversity of whale species and how they correlate with the evolution and diversification of diatoms, tiny, abundant algae that live in the ocean. Uhen also looks at the ways that fossil diversity is affected by global changes.

He is interested in how the body size of whales changes over time, and how whales became the largest living organisms in the world.